Release
by Salchat
Summary: Teyla is troubled and John helps.


**Release**

Teyla felt a sharp stinging blow on her upper arm and backed away from her opponent, taking her two sticks in one hand and flinging up the other in a plea for respite.

"You okay?" asked John. "That's the second hit I've scored. Either I'm improving or you're off your game."

Teyla smiled ruefully, picked up a towel and wiped the sweat from her face and neck.

"I fear my concentration is lacking, John," she said.

"I knew it was too good to be true." He put his bantos rods back in the rack and slung a towel round his neck. "Anything I can help with?"

Teyla looked at him, noting his concerned expression and knowing exactly how it would change in just a moment. She sat down on the window seat and set one of her sticks next to her where it rolled a little way on the flat surface. She retained the other, running a hand along its smooth grain.

"I need to talk," she said, and watched as his face froze. Teyla smiled. "I mean that _I _need to talk, John, and I know that you are a good listener."

He sat down, tentatively, as if the seat might be wired with explosive.

"Am I?"

"Yes. If I required advice, I could go to my people; those that remain," she qualified. "I could speak to Kanaan, but he is… too close, too burdened with his own trauma." She recalled Kanaan's transformation at Michael's hands; physically he had returned to his former self, but inside, she was not sure if he'd ever be truly free from his memories. She continued. "I know that you will understand, and not tell me how I should feel or how I might change."

John's eyebrows rose slightly, his uncertainty showing now, whereas in the heat of battle he would be firm and decisive. Nevertheless, he gave a tiny nod of acquiescence and so Teyla began to speak.

"Torren woke last night, late, and he was wide awake, convinced morning had come. I picked him up and held him close in the silence, and walked with him, even though he is heavy now. I did not feel tired, so I carried him for a while, along the empty hallways. And as I held him, I found myself thinking of his future life; that he will see the dying stages of our people, for we are too few now to sustain a population. I thought of those who are gone, those women and men who would have passed on our culture to him, those who would have borne children to play with him, children that would have been his partners in hunting and learning and who might one day have become his family." Teyla looked down at the smooth wood of the bantos rod she held in her hand and saw how the light caught its line and picked out the numerous dents and scratches which would forever mar its perfection, no matter her care and her polishing. "I thought, so easily, so casually, that I myself may not live to see him grow, that when he makes his first kill, leads his first hunt, comes of age as a man, I may not walk alongside him as a living presence, but merely a ghost, a shadow in his and others' memories." She ran a hand up and down the smooth wood, and found that she couldn't look up and meet John's eyes. "And I was not moved," she said simply, feeling the tightness in her jaw, hearing the hard edge to her words. "My eyes remained dry, my heart steady, I felt no rising in my chest nor sorrow in my mind. All I felt was a strange blankness and a hard, aching lump in my throat as if all my emotions, all my physical reactions had been confined and compressed into that one small area." Her hand moved up to touch her throat and her eyes flashed to John's face, briefly and she saw that he looked down and a little to one side, his gaze unfocussed, his expression bleak with understanding. "I know that you too, in Earth culture, speak of a heart turning to stone, and that is what I felt. As if my heart had become hard and cold."

"I guess there are stones in any galaxy," he murmured. And then, "You've had to find a way of living. You can't be feeling all the time… that kind of stuff, I mean." Their eyes met and his mouth quirked up slightly, at one corner. "You'd never get anything done."

"That is true, John," she agreed. "It is a skill that you and I have both had to learn; to live our lives as they are, to find joy where we may. To be present with our fear and grief and yet find lightness of heart alongside those things."

John shrugged in embarrassed agreement.

"But I feel that sometimes I am too detached," Teyla continued. "I have sometimes found myself aware and yet not aware that I am grieving for my people, for what might have been, that I have emotions inside me that I have set at a distance, as if I have journeyed far into the mountains of my lost home world and left my burdens there and now I cannot reach them whether I will it or no. I have sometimes asked myself if…" She paused, swallowed, took a breath. "If I have time to weep now, as I might wonder whether to make some tea now, as if it were of as little consequence. And then I wonder if I can weep; if I can even let go and allow myself that moment of weakness."

"It's not weakness."

Teyla inclined her head in acknowledgement. "I feel that I have suppressed too much, that perhaps, in locking up my feelings in order to live, perhaps I am not truly living."

John's face became carefully blank, and Teyla thought that she was not making her contradictory feelings clear.

"I believe that, although I may appear, even to myself, to maintain calm acceptance, this is only because my anguish is buried so deeply. I know that my life is precious to me, but perhaps… perhaps I would be more truly aware of my love of life were I to allow myself to feel the full strength of my fear, my grief for what might have been, what will or may never be." Her head dropped forward and she felt her hair brush against her cheeks. There was silence and she heard the soft rustle of fabric as John fidgeted where he sat.

"So," he said, after a while, "you really just need an excuse to get mad. Beat someone up, let it all out, yeah?"

Teyla smiled at his summary and shook her head.

"I will not fight you in that way, John."

"Well, that's good, because I don't think I'd survive that," he drawled. "You want to be dropped off on a Wraith planet, so you can kick some ass?"

"That would be satisfying, but hardly sensible."

"Looks like you're stuck with me, then."

"I said I will not fight you.."

John held up his hands. "It won't be a fight. I don't think a test of skill is what you need. You just need to beat something, hard, and I get that, I see where you're coming from. So," John took up the stick that Teyla had left on the seat, "just think of me, well not me, this stick, like a target you can hit. Hard as you like," he said, generously.

Teyla looked at him thoughtfully. She knew that John was stronger than her; usually she used his strength and exuberance against him, which, with her skill with the sticks, made him an opponent that she could subdue, perhaps not with ease, but certainly without undue effort. To simply strike a rod that he held, however, dealing out direct and obvious blows that he could parry easily…

John got up, the rod in his hand, looked at her questioningly and jerked his head toward the centre of the room in encouragement. She rose and moved into the space. He held up his stick, a hand at either end, one foot behind the other, ready to take all that she had strength to give. Teyla hesitated, then struck, simply and hard.

"Keep going!" John encouraged. She struck again. And again, harder and harder and found her arms and her body respond, feeling the flow of energy turning to a tidal wave of aggression that flooded her veins, her senses, her heart and her mind. She struck and she remembered Michael; her helplessness and her hopelessness, the desperate, rending terror she had felt for her unborn child and what he might become at the hands of this dreadful Wraith-man that she had helped to create. She struck again and again as she thought of her people; all they had lost to the hunger of the Wraith, all those who had been culled for years upon years, longer than anyone could remember, and then their captivity and their dreadful imprisonment and transformation and yet more deaths. She struck for the true Athosian life that her son would never live, and she struck as hard as she could and heard the sounds of her anguish and her rage and her tearing, searing, horror leave her lungs and roar from her constricted throat as she dealt blow after blow after blow to stave off a future that might not happen, a future that she would fight against as hard as anyone could ever fight, a future in which she would not be a part of her own child's life.

The stick broke.

Teyla stopped, trembling with the force of her release and her relief, her battened-down, walled-up heart opened and emptied and yet still full, and with a new sense that now there was space for more love and more life and a little more hope. She looked at the splintered end of the rod in her hand and the broken piece lying on the floor, between her and John. They stood together, listening to her heaving, panting breaths, interspersed with the occasional sob, John rubbing and flexing his arms, where they must surely have been jarred by the frenzy of her blows.

"That do the job?"

She found herself laughing, unsteadily, and stepped toward him. They both sagged forward, their foreheads touched, feeling each other's heat, breath and life.

"Yes," she said. "Thank you."

"Any time."


End file.
